Abstract
James Stewart was the sixth King of Scotland and the first King of England named James. He is known to history, therefore, as James VI and I. He was a king nearly all his life. He was a mere baby in 1567 when rebels overthrew his mother and placed him on the throne of Scotland. He was a seasoned ruler by the time he succeeded to the throne of England in 1603 upon the death of Queen Elizabeth. From that point forward he ruled the whole British Isles until his death in 1625. James was also the most prominent man in early modern Britain who had (or was suspected of having) sexual relations with other men, yet few historians have treated this subject well, and no one has studied it in depth.1
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes and References
A few historians do stand out for their superior handling of James’s sexuality. See Caroline Bingham, James I of England (London, 1981), pp. 78–80, 83–4, 134–5, 160–1. By far the best study of one of James’s lovers is
Roger Lockyer, Buckingham: The Life and Political Career of George Villiers, First Duke of Buckingham 1592–1628 (London, 1981). See also
David M. Bergeron, Royal Family, Royal Lovers: King fames of England and Scotland (Columbia, MO, 1991), pp. 28–31, 165–6, 170, 183–4. Bergeron’s forthcoming King James and Letters of Homoerotic Desire (Iowa City, 1999), an edition of the letters between James and Buckingham, should be another important contribution to the subject. There are two good recent surveys of James’s life:
S.J. Houston, James I, 2nd edn (London, 1995) and
Roger Lockyer, James VI and I (London, 1998). In view of the forthright treatment of sexuality in his Buckingham, it is surprising and disappointing to see Lockyer play down this subject in his more recent study of James. Lockyer merely writes that ‘James found his principal emotional — and conceivably sexual — fulfilment in handsome young men with fine French manners, on whom he lavished not only affection but money, places and titles’ (p. 12). Italics mine.
David H. Willson, King James VI and I (New York, 1967), p. 337. Similarly, referring to an occasion when James may have arranged to meet a male lover, Willson calls it ‘an immoral purpose’ (p. 456 n. 6).
Lee also adopted at times an almost snickering tone (referring to James’s lovers as ‘the apple of the king’s eye’ and ‘James’s pretty favorite’). Maurice Lee Jr, Great Britain’s Solomon (Urbana, 1990), pp. 234–6, 240–2, 247–9, 255. See also
Lee’s ‘James I and the Historians: Not a Bad King After All?’, Albion, 16 (Summer 1984), 157–63.
Jenny Wormald, ‘James VI and I: Two Kings or One?’, History, 68 (June 1983), 187–92. See also her ‘Gunpowder, Treason, and Scots’, Journal of British Studies, 24, no. 2 (April 1985), 141–68. Wormald should have much more to say on these subjects in her long-awaited biography of James. At the 1996 meeting of the North American Conference on British Studies, Wormald said that the problem for James (as opposed to Queen Elizabeth) ‘was not one of gender but of nationality’. I would say that the problem for James was a combination of both gender and nationality.
Bray, Homosexuality in Renaissance England (London, 1982), pp. 13, 55, 62, 70, 111, 121 n. 14, 130 n. 77. Bray was sceptical about James’s alleged homosexuality. In his well-known article on male friendship, Bray cautioned readers not to assume that James’s favourites crossed the line from friendship to sodomy. Alan Bray, ‘Homosexuality and the Signs of Male Friendship in Elizabethan England’, History Workshop Journal, issue 29 (Spring 1990), 13. There are other authors who have given James more attention than Bray did.
Most noteworthy are Jonathan Goldberg, James I and the Politics of Literature: Jonson, Shakespeare, Donne, and Their Contemporaries (London, 1983) and
Bruce R. Smith, Homosexual Desire in Shakespeare’s England: A Cultural Poetics (Chicago, 1991). A short but good essay about King James and the history of homosexuality is Ellis Hanson, ‘Sodomy and Kingcraft in Urania and Antony and Cleopatra’, in
Claude J. Summers (ed.), Homosexuality in Renaissance and Enlightenment England: Literary Representations in Historical Context (New York, 1992), pp. 135–51. Less successful is
Robert Shephard, ‘Sexual Rumours in English Politics: The Cases of Elizabeth I and James I’, in Jacqueline Murray and Konrad Eisenbichler (eds), Desire and Discipline: Sex and Sexuality in the Premodern West (Toronto, 1996), pp. 101–22.
Michael Rocke, Forbidden Friendships: Homosexuality and Male Culture in Renaissance Florence (Oxford, 1996), pp. 6, 9.
Alan Bray, Homosexuality in Renaissance England, pp. 10, 103, 104, 108, 112. After writing ‘London’s Sodomites: Homosexual Behavior and Western Culture in the Eighteenth Century’, Journal of Social History, 11, no. 1 (Fall 1977), 1–33, Randolph Trumbach began to argue for a major watershed in the early eighteenth century. See his ‘Sodomitical Subcultures, Sodomitical Roles, and the Gender Revolution of the Eighteenth Century: The Recent Historiography’, in Robert Purks Maccubbin (ed.), ‘Tis Nature’s Fault: Unauthorized Sexuality During the Enlightenment (Cambridge, 1987), pp. 109–21; ‘Sodomitical Assaults, Gender Role, and Sexual Development in Eighteenth-Century London’, in
Kent Gerard and Gert Hekma (eds), The Pursuit of Sodomy: Male Homosexuality in Renaissance and Enlightenment Europe (New York, 1989), pp. 407–29; ‘The Birth of the Queen: Sodomy and the Emergence of Gender Equality in Modern Culture, 1660–1750’, in
Martin Duberman and others (eds), Hidden from History: Reclaiming the Gay and Lesbian Past (New York, 1989), pp. 129–40; ‘Sodomy Transformed: Aristocratic Libertinage, Public Reputation and the Gender Revolution of the 18th Century’, in
Michael S. Kimmel (ed.), Love Letters Between a Certain Late Nobleman and the Famous Mr. Wilson (New York, 1990), 105–24; ‘Erotic Fantasy and Male Libertinism in Enlightenment England’, in
Lynn Hunt (ed.), The Invention of Pornography: Obscenity and the Origins of Modernity, 1500–1800 (New York, 1993), pp. 253–82; ‘London’s Sapphists: From Three Sexes to Four Genders in the Making of Modern Culture’, in
Gilbert Herdt (ed.), Third Sex, Third Gender: Beyond Sexual Dimorphism in Culture and History (New York, 1994), pp. 111–36; and ‘Are Modern Western Lesbian Women and Gay Men a Third Gender?’, in
Martin Duberman (ed.), A Queer World: The Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader (New York, 1997), pp. 87–99. Trumbach’s view will soon be summed up in his two-volume Sex and the Gender Revolution, forthcoming from the University of Chicago Press.
Randolph Trumbach, Sex and the Gender Revolution, vol. 1, Heterosexuality and the Third Gender in Enlightenment London (Chicago, 1998). See especially pp. 3–22.
‘New-inventionism’ is Joseph Cady’s apt term for the social or cultural constructionist position. See his ‘“Masculine Love”, Renaissance Writing, and the “New Invention” of Homosexuality’, in Summers, Homosexuality in Renaissance and Enlightenment England, pp. 9–40; ‘Renaissance Awareness and Language for Heterosexuality: “Love” and “Feminine Love”’, in Claude J. Summers and Ted-Larry Pebworth (eds), Renaissance Discourses of Desire (Columbia, MO, 1993), pp. 143–58; The “Masculine Love” of the “Princes of Sodom” “Practicing the Art of Ganymede” at Henri Ill’s Court: The Homosexuality of Henry III and His Mignons in Pierre de L’Estoile’s Mémoires-Journaux’, in Murray and Eisenbichler, Desire and Discipline, pp. 123–54. See also
Rictor Norton, The Myth of the Modern Homosexual: Queer History and the Search for Cultural Unity (London, 1997) and Gregory W. Bredbeck, ‘Tradition and the Individual Sodomite: Barnfield, Shakespeare, and Subjective Desire’, in Summers, Homosexuality in Renaissance and Enlightenment England, pp. 41–68. Simon Shepherd questions the social constructionist position (which he calls ‘the virgin birth of the homosexual’) more gingerly in ‘What’s So Funny About Ladies’ Tailors? A Survey of Some Male (Homo)sexual Types in the Renaissance’, Textual Practice, 6(1992), 17–30.
‘New-inventionism’ is Joseph Cady’s apt term for the social or cultural constructionist position. See his ‘“Masculine Love”, Renaissance Writing, and the “New Invention” of Homosexuality’, in Summers, Homosexuality in Renaissance and Enlightenment England, pp. 9–40; ‘Renaissance Awareness and Language for Heterosexuality: “Love” and “Feminine Love”’, in Claude J. Summers and Ted-Larry Pebworth (eds), Renaissance Discourses of Desire (Columbia, MO, 1993), pp. 143–58; The “Masculine Love” of the “Princes of Sodom” “Practicing the Art of Ganymede” at Henri Ill’s Court: The Homosexuality of Henry III and His Mignons in Pierre de L’Estoile’s Mémoires-Journaux’, in Murray and Eisenbichler, Desire and Discipline, pp. 123–54.
See also Rictor Norton, The Myth of the Modern Homosexual: Queer History and the Search for Cultural Unity (London, 1997) and Gregory W. Bredbeck, ‘Tradition and the Individual Sodomite: Barnfield, Shakespeare, and Subjective Desire’, in Summers, Homosexuality in Renaissance and Enlightenment England, pp. 41–68. Simon Shepherd questions the social constructionist position (which he calls ‘the virgin birth of the homosexual’) more gingerly in ‘What’s So Funny About Ladies’ Tailors? A Survey of Some Male (Homo)sexual Types in the Renaissance’, Textual Practice, 6(1992), 17–30.
Alan Sinfield, The Wilde Century: Effeminacy, Oscar Wilde and the Queer Moment (New York, 1994). See especially pp. 4 and 27.
James M. Saslow, Ganymede in the Renaissance (New Haven, 1986), p. 243 n. 31;
Carl Miller, Stages of Desire: Gay Theatre’s Hidden History (London, 1996), p. 148;
Thomas Cogswell, The Blessed Revolution: English Politics and the Coming of War, 1621–1624 (Cambridge, 1989), p. 72. Cogswell’s source was
Andrew Clark, ‘Dr. Plume’s Notebook’, The Essex Review, XIV (1905), 9–12, 163. Unfortunately, this notebook is a collection of gossip, anecdotes and extracts compiled later in the seventeenth century, so it falls far short of being authentic firsthand testimony.
David Cressy, ‘Gender Trouble and Cross-Dressing in Early Modern England’, Journal of British Studies, 35 (October 1996), 451.
Carole Levin, The Heart and Stomach of a King: Elizabeth I and the Politics of Sex and Power (Philadelphia, 1994).
David Underdown observed: ‘Critics of James I’s foreign policy and his extravagant court saw in both a decline from the — paradoxically — manly virtues of Queen Elizabeth’s days’, A Freeborn People: Politics and the Nation in Seventeenth-Century England (Oxford, 1996), p. 27. Lord Treasurer Salisbury may have inadvertently betrayed apprehension about James’s manliness when he reassuringly told Parliament in 1610, ‘yt may appeare unto us that we have a man to our Kinge (and happy are we that our Kinge is a man)’. S.R. Gardiner (ed.), Parliamentary Debates in 1610 (London, 1862), p. 25.
For recent appreciative studies of James, see Linda Levy Peck (ed.), The Mental World of the Jacobean Court (Cambridge, 1991); Jenny Wormald’s ‘James VI and I: Two Kings or One?’; Maurice Lee Jr’s ‘James I and the Historians’; Lee, Government by Pen: Scotland under James VI and I (London, 1980); Lee, Great Britain’s Solomon: James VI and I in His Three Kingdoms (Urbana, 1990);
Gordon Donaldson, Scotland: James V to James VII (Edinburgh, 1971); and
R. C. Munden, ‘James I and “the growth of mutual distrust”: King, Commons, and Reform, 1603–1604’, in Kevin Sharpe (ed.), Faction and Parliament: Essays on Early Stuart History (Oxford, 1978), pp. 43–72. S.J. Houston’s James I is an unusually well-balanced survey. G.P.V. Akrigg provides a concise, perceptive and nicely balanced assessment of James’s relative strengths and weaknesses in the introduction to his Letters of King James VI and I (Berkeley, 1984), pp. 15–20. For a pioneering reevaluation, see
Marc L. Schwarz, ‘James I and the Historians: Toward a Reconsideration’, Journal of British Studies, 13, no. 2 (May 1974), 114–34. For a more recent survey of the literature, see
Susanne Collier, ‘Recent Studies in James VI and I’, English Literary Renaissance, 23, no. 3 (1993), 509–19.
Pauline Croft, ‘Libels, Popular Literacy and Public Opinion in Early Modern England’, Historical Research, 68 (October 1995), 279;
A Croft, ‘The Reputation of Robert Cecil: Libels, Political Opinion and Popular Awareness in the Early Seventeenth Century’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, sixth series, 1 (London, 1991), pp. 43–69;
Alastair Bellany, ‘“Raylinge Rymes and Vaunting Verse”: Libellous Politics in Early Stuart England, 1603–1628’, in Kevin Sharpe and Peter Lake (eds), Culture and Politics in Early Stuart England (Stanford, 1993), pp. 285–310;
Bellany, ‘Mistress Turner’s Deadly Sins: Sartorial Transgression, Court Scandal, and Politics in Early Stuart England’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 58, no. 2 (1996), 179–210;
Thomas Cogswell, ‘Underground Verse and the Transformation of Early Stuart Political Culture’, in Susan D. Amussen and Mark Kishlansky (eds), Political Culture and Cultural Politics in Early Modern England: Essays Presented to David Underdown (Manchester, 1995), pp. 277–300; Lockyer, James VI and I, p. 173.
Richard Cust, ‘Honour and Politics in Early Stuart England’, Past and Present, 149 (November 1995), 58.
Copyright information
© 2000 Michael B. Young
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Young, M.B. (2000). Introduction. In: King James and the History of Homosexuality. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230514898_1
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230514898_1
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-39432-6
Online ISBN: 978-0-230-51489-8
eBook Packages: Palgrave History CollectionHistory (R0)